Faster than the speed of United!
sunday-times.co.uk
<...Exact details of the findings remain confidential because they have been submitted to Nature, the international scientific journal, for review prior to possible publication.
The work was carried out by Dr Lijun Wang, of the NEC research institute in Princeton, who transmitted a pulse of light towards a chamber filled with specially treated caesium gas.
Before the pulse had fully entered the chamber it had gone right through it and travelled a further 60ft across the laboratory. In effect it existed in two places at once, a phenomenon that Wang explains by saying it travelled 300 times faster than light.
The research is already causing controversy among physicists. What bothers them is that if light could travel forward in time it could carry information. This would breach one of the basic principles in physics - causality, which says that a cause must come before an effect. It would also shatter Einstein's theory of relativity since it depends in part on the speed of light being unbreachable.
This weekend Wang said he could not give details but confirmed: "Our light pulses did indeed travel faster than the accepted speed of light. I hope it will give us a much better understanding of the nature of light and how it behaves."
Dr Raymond Chiao, professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, who is familiar with Wang's work, said he was impressedby the findings. "This is a fascinating experiment," he said.
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It is obvious that the speed of light is so pathetically slow that it renders the universe a solid. Meaning, the time taken for light to cross the universe matches the time the universe exists. Okay, we can putz around our local galaxies, but that is small consolation. It's like wading in neck deep mud - slow and not very satisfying. We want hyperdrive!
Anyway, to talk of the speed of light is silly. It's a self-referential system and absurd. Speed uses time to define itself, but uses distance as the measure of time. So speed = distance/distance. A circular argument, especially when your measuring stick for distance is as stretchy as the universe obviously is.
Distance is handy for circling the sun on good old earth, but not much use for circling the universe or black holes as they do their thing.
So, we can conclude that light is way too slow in the boring old 300,000 km per second specification configuration for static conditions [or whatever it is].
Throw in some reverse spin gravitons and you'll find things a bit more interesting still. Things are getting much more amazing in the quantum tunneling and strings business by the look of it.
So, where do I buy some caesium? We'll be able to talk right across the galaxy without much latency if we can just fill the void with a bit of caesium. Of, just use 3 geostationary satellites and fill the atmosphere with caesium.
Pending supplies of caesium, Globalstar Telecommunications Limited shares are cheap.
Mqurice |
